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Monday, December 10, 2007

Guy Ritchie's not-very-good Revolver is being given a second chance in America; he tells MTV that the reason it didn't go down well in the UK was because he was so bloody loved:

My previous movies were very big in the U.K. They had an investment in who I was and what I stood for. They put me on a pedestal. There was just too much of an investment in the whole thing. Inevitably, someone had to go tumbling. This facilitated that tumble. It gave them what they needed.

And not because the film isn't very good, even by his low standards.

Guy, though, bless him, still thinks Swept Away was a good deed that became punished:

It's the movie I intended to make. From my point of view, it was a film that couldn't transcend the external factors. Maybe it would have been wiser had I identified those to begin with. We did what we wanted to do, and we were both happy with what we did.

MTV: When you heard the reactions, did it feel like the critics were watching a different movie?

Ritchie: Yes, it did. I still don't get what the fuck that was all about.

Somewhat surprisingly, Guy then decides to compare the critical panning with the reaction to the adoption of David Banda:

I mean it was like the reaction when my wife decided to adopt a starving child. I couldn't make any sense of it. The child was nearly dead. [His] siblings had died. And she stopped that. How do you get demonized for that?

Except, of course, Madonna wasn't demonised - she was criticised, and quite fairly, for taking a child who was claimed to be an orphan, who turned out not be an orphan; for 'adopting' him without due process; for going on television and claiming there weren't any rules in place covering this sort of "adoption" despite there being laws in place at a national and OAU level; for having offered to defray course costs for members of the department who oversaw the adoption process and... well, so on and so on. Nobody demonised her for "stopping children dying."

Of course, just for the cost of the private jet which flew a bemused-looking child to Britain, Madonna could have "stopped" a lot more children dying by using that cash to vaccinate them against malaria, the disease which claimed David's siblings. But that's less photogenic, of course.